You can pin your hopes on a plan. You can pin your cloth quilt to a curtain. You can pin down the causes of a demise. You can pin a locale on a map.

Pins will stick you if you’re not careful and maybe even if you are.

What plan?

Let us count the steps.

One, put a pin on the street one block from Pearl. 

Two, refuse the backward looking. It doesn’t help.

Three, pin the little cloth landscape on a curtain at eye-level and step back to look. 

Stitched on: a dark speckled foreground to resemble the grubby snow of late spring. Was a table runner. Was dyed by a dye master in Georgia. Was carefully once upon a time appliquéd with flowers, stems, and leaves. Look at the impossibly tiny blanket stitch anchoring the cloth swatches down. Someone else’s intention and skill from long ago. 

Flowers under dirty snow is a metaphor I can work with. The blooms will open again. The coming flowers of pink peony, buttery daffodil, delicate porcelain-like magnolia.

Above the dark foreground lies a tiny cloth row of houses. Some windows are bright, evidence of people inside going about their business – meal prep, showers, packing for travel, sitting alone and watching the news.

I wonder how many moods reside in each structure and how many textures of silence.

The strip of houses was constructed long ago and bears evidence of an old style of working. Hurried machine stitches, sometimes zigzag, sometimes swirls applied loosely with the feed dog down. Nylon netting makes an appearance. 

One house sits atop a foundation of yellow floral silk. Can we assume then that those occupants anticipate the daffodils with something akin to hope, the Strait of Hormuz be damned? Another house sits on top of a strip of green batik. Perhaps they too call up memories of springs past and adjust their moods accordingly.

But what about the two houses sitting on a dark cotton, a dark cotton with gold script printed on, legible as script but not legible as words. What does that tell us? That there’s a message at the bottom of our pain for us to pinpoint and decipher — or is its unreadability the entire point? 

Who is he to me and who am I to him? Or to him? Or to him?

Two reddish windows speak to passion. Sssh! We won’t speculate on the goings on there.

A brocade sky. A green silk moon. A tree of organza. All features still being adhered to the layers with stitch. Until then, they are provisional. The moon could fall out of the sky and be replaced by dark clouds.

Dark clouds come and go, but when they come and hang on the horizon for too long, they have a way of feeling permanent. 

Is there a medication for this? A right practice? Holy dog-walking, say, or tai chi for old ladies. The sky wraps around all the Earth, not just me and him and him but all the Earth.

The fingernail of a moon this crisp March morning in Colorado was visible between electrical wires – as if the wires were the score and the moon a solitary note. We look up. We hope not to trip.

Some source of water from one of the garage bays across from this place releases water – car washing maybe – so that our alley tarmac is constantly littered with puddles. No rain. No snow. But puddles.

He goes off to fish. We stay back and try not to worry

Left-hand Creek is still a bit frozen, apparently. 

I wonder, “Left-hand Creek” — oriented from where — facing north, I suppose. Do you get confused if your maps don’t put north on top? A weird hierarchy of the familiar.

The familiar, as in face-washing, hair brushing, egg salad-making, stitching a quilt on one’s lap, offers rewards I’d never have believed possible as a young person. 

As a young person I tore around half-cocked, easy-going in appearance, but really running in semi-panic from a dark foundation with an unreadable script. 

I use a washcloth now for my face. I never used to. In fact, I didn’t used to wash my face at all. Your silence tells me everything. His silence tells me nothing.

When we look back what will stand out? Maybe the sight of his car disappearing around a corner. Or maybe, a luscious egg salad sandwich on sourdough. That chip of a moon appearing between wires strung across a morning sky, perhaps. My loneliness and terror. His loneliness and terror. And his. 

We gather what we can by way of survival. A touch. An announcement of love. A plate offered up with chips and sandwich. Finishing The Lincoln Lawyer Season Four for what that’s worth.

Walking, walking around unfamiliar blocks, looking at homes and businesses that mean nothing to us, but that stand in relation to the morning, the sky, and the moon like everything else does. 

Where is home? Where is it? For me, for him, and for him? I will be gone soon, and I hope he will not. To stay, to live, to plan, to pin a locale on a map and go there. To fish perhaps.